Our last digger dies at 107

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Peter Casserly as an exhausted veteran after leading the Anzac Day
parade in Perth this year.Photo: Megan Powell

Peter Casserly, Australia's last survivor of the Western Front
in World War I, died yesterday. Aged 107, he was also believed to
be the oldest Australian male.

Despite having served on the Somme, his main claim to fame may
have been the longevity of his marriage. Peter and Monica Casserly
had been married for 80 years and 10 months when she died at 102 in
2004.

"The passing time never changed the loveliness of my wife for
me," he said recently. "She remained a beautiful blessing
throughout our long marriage."

Mr Casserly died in a nursing home in Perth. His family said he
could have lived longer if he had not fallen out of bed a week ago.
"But it was a bad fall and, although he picked up for a few days,
he went down hill gradually after that," his son, Peter junior,
said.

Although frail and virtually blind, Mr Casserly could still
recall recently the day in 1917 that he sailed for France at the
age of 19, dropping a bottled note to his mother into the Indian
Ocean as he departed.

The farewell message eventually washed up in Esperance and was
posted back to his mother in Fremantle.

He opposed the war that claimed nearly 61,000 Australian lives,
48,000 of them on the Western Front. And he knew 28 of the men
listed on North Fremantle's war monument as killed in action. He
marched in an Anzac Day parade at the age of 22 but it took another
84 years before he attended his second in 2004. He liked to be
thought of among the last World War I veterans and a framed map of
the Western Front hung on the wall at his nursing home. But he
never joined the RSL.

Until his last few years, Mr Casserly preferred to talk about
family, work and the East Fremantle Football Club rather than his
two-and-a-half years of army service.

He left school at 13 and worked as a blacksmith's apprentice,
then as a fireman on the railways. In France, he became a sapper (a
private in the Royal Australian Engineers) at the infamous
battlefields of Ypres, Armentieres and Amiens, building and
repairing fortifications, working two kilometres behind the front
line.

After leaving the army in 1919, he worked as a labourer, opened
a wood yard and then turned his boyhood hobby of crayfishing into a
career. He had two sons with Monica - Edward who died before him,
and Peter junior. Mr Casserly also had seven grandchildren and 11
great grandchildren.

Peter junior said his father was more of a friend than a dad. He
joined his father in the bush cutting firewood when he was 14.

A state funeral will be held at St Patrick's Basilica in
Fremantle next week.

"I would rather have done it my way just at the local church Our
Lady of Fatima around the corner," Peter junior said.

"But the Government are insisting on it. My father was a plain
man and would not have wanted all that fuss."

His father attributed his longevity to rum.

"They gave every soldier two issues of rum each day on the
Western Front, but I knew my way around and used to get three," he
said. "And I've been drinking rum ever since."

The old man also loved to sing. Even towards the end of his
life, he entertained visitors with songs brought back from the
trenches more than 85 years earlier.

Mr Casserly's death left one sailor from World War I, W. Evan
Allan, 105, of Melbourne, along with John Ross, 105, of Bendigo,
who enlisted but never left Australia.